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Alembic Club » Swap Shop and Wish Lists » Seen on craigslist, eBay, and elsewhere » 1933 Vivi-Tone electric/acoustic guitar by Lloyd Loar « Previous Next »

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ed_zeppelin
Advanced Member
Username: ed_zeppelin

Post Number: 300
Registered: 2-2010
Posted on Sunday, March 20, 2016 - 11:46 pm:   Edit Post

Say what? Yeah, I know. A little odd for this sacred space, but not really. Alembic is the most innovative musical instrument maker on earth, especially when it comes to those "never duplicated" features:



Anchor the strings in a block of brass (and that's just the visible component, considering the supporting infrastructure of sustain blocks and lams). Shaped like a bird, of course. Slotted, for easy string changing. And that Leonardo Da Vinci-level marvel of engineering: the Alembic bridge.

"Perfection" is subjective, but that bad boy gets my vote. It does precisely what it's supposed to do, to perfection. And it's absolutely unique.

I'm fascinated with the progression of innovations, especially when it comes to the evolvement of something to its highest form. Like the Alembic bridge.

Here is a 1933 Vivi-Tone electric guitar, the great grandpappy of our electric guitars. It has features so wildly ahead of their time that nobody has even come close to duplicating them. I consider it a relic of a mind like Tesla, Da Vinci and Beethoven all rolled into one.



The key word is "electric." To put that in perspective, the amp that came with this guitar was battery powered, because they didn't have AC power in most of the country!



Lloyd Loar also thought it was cool to be able to rock out anywhere you wanted to, of course. Consider for a moment that it was nearly half a century before another comparable amp came along:



To put the era in our perspective, imagine if electricity had been invented around 1985. 95% of the country is unpaved. Tone controls don't exist yet. And the Great Depression started in 2012.

The guitar has such unique features as a sliding drawer for the electronics, built into the upper bout:



Starfire, anybody? Wouldn't that be easier than squeezing it all in through f-holes? I've never seen it on any other guitar, yet it's such a simple, effective solution.

It's most unique feature is the bridge, which allows the player to manually select "full electric," "full acoustic" or anywhere in between. You're not actually looking at the soundboard, by the way. That is on the back of the guitar.

To quote the seller;


quote:

The electronics are mounted in a removable drawer which slides out of the bass side of the rim, with the signal transmitted from the wooden bridge to a metal plate sensed by the coil of the pickup beneath. The bridge has another highly eccentric feature-two pivoting wooden arms screwed at their front ends to the top pass under the bridge top and via a small block of wood transfer vibration to the guitar's back, which was intended to be the primary soundboard!




The bridge on this particular Vivi-Tone (serial #215) is different than any other that I've ever seen. For comparison, here is #300 from the same year, at the National Musical Instrument Museum:




quote:

This guitar is based on Loar's U. S. Pat. 2,020,557 (filed 1934, awarded 1935), in which electric amplification is combined with an acoustic guitar body. The design offered a player the option of switching between electric and acoustic amplification, or combining both, with metal posts through the bridge that transfers vibrations from the strings to the bar-armature. With the posts raised, the bridge comes in contact with the soundboard for exclusively acoustic amplification; with the posts lowered to contact the metal bar-armature, both acoustic and electric amplification is engaged, and with the posts lowered completely, the bridge is lifted off of the soundboard and supported only by the bar-armature for exclusively electric amplification. The back of the guitar, made from arched spruce, with two f-shaped soundholes, incorporates another of Loar's ideas, covered more extensively in U. S. Pat. 2,046,331 (filed in 1934 but awarded in 1936), to use the back of the instrument as a second soundboard by transferring bridge pressure from the top.




Loar only worked at Gibson for five years. At some point in 1924, Gibson records show that he made the first solidbody electric guitar in history, fitted with an electrostatic pickup. A full ten years before the Rickenbacker "frying pan" lap steel. Unfortunately, that guitar has never turned up (yet) and no pictures of it exist.

Loar's successor at Gibson, Guy Hart, patented a pickup system heavily influenced (some would say stolen) from the Vivi-Tone pickup, here on the EH-150 electric Hawaiian guitar:



Note the coil has been detached for the photo. The next step in innovation was instead of sliding the coil over the metal stanchion attached to the magnetic plate, the coil was wound around a magnet! That was the iconic "Charlie Christian pickup. Here is the one from Hank Garland's '55 Gibson Byrdland



Lloyd Loar was a genius who went to work for Gibson shortly after the corporation that bought Orville Gibson's surname ditched every single one of his innovations (hollow neck, back and sides carved from a single piece of wood, carved top etc.) and introduced a turn-of-the-century form of group sex known as the "mandolin orchestra." (SFW)



Mandolin orchestras (<-Wikipedia) were a cultural phenomena that evolved from banjo orchestras. Slaves had invented banjos, which exploded in popularity after the Civil War. Newly-arrived Italian immigrants introduced the mandolin to banjo orchestras and it grew from there.

There were tens of thousands of mandolin orchestras all over the world. Every town in America had at least one, in the days before radio, movies or other forms of mass entertainment.

The "Mastertone" and "L" series instruments Loar created are still in production nearly a century later, and the originals are some of the most expensive and beloved instruments ever made.

The "holy grail" of Loar-signed instruments is the Gibson F5 "Fern" mandolin, of which fewer than twenty are known to exist. One recently sold for a quarter of a million dollars.

Every mandolin part recorded by Led Zeppelin was performed on the Loar-signed 1924 F5 Fern owned by John Paul Jones.

I found this nifty transcript from an "Antiques Roadshow" appraisal for a 1924 Gibson F5 mandolin that says more about Lloyd Loar eloquently than I could possibly write more better:


quote:

GUEST: It was purchased by my great-grandfather during the Depression. He purchased it from, I believe, a neighbor who at the time needed some extra money, and he wanted his son, my grandfather, to learn how to play a musical instrument.

APPRAISER: Well, when you walked in with this, I saw the case, I went, "Oh, my God, I know what that is." And I thought, "Can it be?" And I opened up the case and there it was, this wonderful Gibson F-5 mandolin. It's the type of F-5 that's very easy for us to identify the year from because I can tell that it's what we call a Lloyd Loar model F-5 with this fern inlay in the peghead.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: Lloyd Loar was an acoustic engineer and great mandolin virtuoso who worked at the Gibson company back in the '10s and '20s. And he really was the father of the modern mandolin. And what he did to make the mandolin what it is today is... he did various things to it like internally, it has parallel tone bars.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: It has an elevated fingerboard, elevated over the body. It has two F holes, like a violin, and actually, similar to a violin, it has the bridge positioned around the center of the body, around the center of the arch. And it is arched like a violin and tap toned, meaning internally tuned. The thicknesses of the plates inside are tuned like a violin.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: And Loar was the first guy to do this to a mandolin. It also has a longer playing length of the neck. It has 15 frets to the body. Earlier mandolins had shorter necks. Gibson had been making these F-style mandolins from the turn of the century on, but this innovation in mandolin making was something that Loar excelled in, and this became basically the prototype style for all mandolins to come. Loar also developed this nice little, neat screw-in pickguard clip, which was a lot neater than the earlier ones.

It has inside the Gibson label with serial number, as well... and the other side, it's got the master model label. Now, this was the professional, master-grade mandolin that Gibson put out late 1922 and onwards. And these early ones, the ones made while Loar was at the factory from late 1922 through 1924, we call them Lloyd Loar model F-5s. This has the most beautiful what they call Cremona brown sunburst color to it. If I had to grade it in Gibson mandolins, or Lloyd Loar mandolins, I'd probably put it in the top ten percent of the ones I've seen.

GUEST: Wow.

APPRAISER: When did he buy it again?

GUEST: During the Great Depression. From what I understand, he paid $20 for it, and at the time, you know, it was estimated probably around $600 is what I'm told.

APPRAISER: Right, that being said, I would say these days, a correct asking price through a dealer in a shop would be about $175,000.

GUEST: Oh, my gosh! (laughs) Wow! It's been in a closet in a farmhouse for many, many years.




As for the price of this 1933 Vivi-Tone, I like to think of Alan Watts advice: "you walk into a grocery store with money, and you leave with wealth." Whoever owns that guitar will be wealthy indeed. It's a piece of music history.

I would if I could. I'd paint it with black house paint.
edwardofhuncote
Senior Member
Username: edwardofhuncote

Post Number: 892
Registered: 6-2014
Posted on Monday, March 21, 2016 - 3:53 am:   Edit Post

Guy was quite an innovator to be sure... not every one of his ideas worked too well, but that's just how it goes when you're in uncharted waters. That F-5 thingy turned out to be a homerun, but wasn't recognized for another 50 years. Now everybody tries to make them to Loar specs. Lloyd Loar signed Gibson mandolins are quite literally modern-day Stradivari. I've played about a dozen of the 200-some out there, and I promise you, it's not just hype... they are incredible. Perfect marriage of art and physics.

One of these days I'll do an illustrated post on another Lloyd Loar invention, one that wasn't quite a complete failure, but ultimately may have cost him his job - the "ball-bearing" banjo. My Dad (and me by extension) is just nuts about them, but they were only made for 2-1/2 years. They're probably the *least* sought after of all pre-war Gibson banjos today. Of course we had to have one.
ed_zeppelin
Advanced Member
Username: ed_zeppelin

Post Number: 301
Registered: 2-2010
Posted on Monday, March 21, 2016 - 9:48 am:   Edit Post

Gruhn has a Loar-signed 1924 F5 Fern for sale, a good opportunity to see lots of glistening closeups. If you don't feel like shelling out $180,000 for a mandolin, they have an empty case for one for only $10,000. (Cases are tuned to a dropped D, in case you were wondering.)



In keeping with the theme of Loar's pioneering innovations in electric instruments, though, probably the most overlooked factor today was his incredible fame as a performer. He was world famous in his day, playing to sold-out houses all over the globe. The US government sent him to Europe during World War I to entertain the troops, making him the earliest "USO" performer.

According to Roger Siminoff's excellent biography of Lloyd Loar, while there he studied at the National Conservatory of Music and the National Institute of Radio Engineering, both in Paris. (Less than twenty years after Marconi invented radio, it should be noted.)

Here is his version of a Leslie cabinet:




quote:

The speaker cabinet that accompanied Loar’s ViviTone Clavier features a 110v motor that rotates a fan-like blade. The blade turns in front of the powered-coil speaker as well as covering and uncovering an opening to the cabinet itself ...




Here's the world's first electric piano, The Vivi-Tone Clavier:



It was donated by Siminoff to the National Musical Instrument Museum (great detailed description).

Briefly, it used tone bars instead of strings (like the Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos - think: Supertramp) sticky pads and electrostatic pickups. It was copied (blatantly) by Hohner as their "Pianet." With two slight changes (electromagnetic pickup, strings instead of bars and a stiff harpsichord plectrum-like "tangent" on each key), it became the fabled Clavinet (made famous by Stevie Wonder's "Superstition").

The reason this stream-of-innovation is so interesting is because Loar had invented that mechanism in 1937! He called it the "Electric Harpsichord" (here is the technical info from the National Musical Instrument Museum. Loar's unique innovation in this case was designing an elliptical action for the metal "jacks" on each key, creating the world's first touch-sensitive electronic keyboard!


quote:

Unlike the traditional harpsichord, whose plectra do not allow the player to change the dynamic output by altering the pressure and speed of the touch, Loar's electronic harpsichord employed a novel mechanism that brushed the strings with metal picks that move in an elliptical fashion. While the picks, strictly speaking, do not pluck the strings like harpsichord jacks, the effect is close enough for Loar to call his instrument a touch-sensitive harpsichord ...




Here's the world's first solidbody electric violin:




quote:

Loar's impetus for developing the electric stringed instrument in this patent was to provide an improvement over instruments of standard design by allowing the manufacturer: 1) to "predetermine and fix" the tonal qualities of the instrument (by varying the size and division of the paramagnetic bar-armature); 2) to allow for consistent tonal production (by eliminating the acoustical amplification of a violin body, with its inconsistent sympathetic response to tonal vibrations); and 3) to limit distortion over a wide range of precisely controlled dynamics (by using a magneto-acoustic pickup that can generate a weak electrical current independently of a power-circuit or battery, is not sensitive to extraneous electrical or acoustical disturbances, and whose volume can be controlled using a variable-resistance volume control unit ...


elwoodblue
Senior Member
Username: elwoodblue

Post Number: 1863
Registered: 6-2002
Posted on Monday, March 21, 2016 - 9:03 pm:   Edit Post

I found this in the surf,
http://www.digitalviolin.com/Fender.html

I like Leo's headstock design-

sonicus
Senior Member
Username: sonicus

Post Number: 4835
Registered: 5-2009
Posted on Monday, March 21, 2016 - 9:08 pm:   Edit Post

Way Kool!

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